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It was the first day of a new school year at the University of Bright Harbour, and the college lawn looked like one big end of summer party. There were students lazing on the grass, students dancing, nervous kids fresh out of high school and experienced partiers who looked like they'd stayed on a few extra years. There were student societies and signs and jugglers and acapella groups and an Ultimate Frisbee game. And there was beer. Everywhere you looked, beer seemed to just appear in people's hands, or being poured over people's heads. Or occasionally, although it was only midday, being barfed up behind the bushes.
Bea hitched her book bag up on her shoulder and thought I'm too old for this.
"You are not too old for this," Jackie said, sternly, when they met up for coffee.
"Easy for you to say, Professor. You're a teacher and I'm a freshman and we're the same age."
"I'm just an adjunct. Cheap and disposable." Jackie gave a weary shrug.
Bea sipped her coffee in lieu of thinking of anything to say. She knew Jackie's job was tenuous, much less secure than the title 'Professor' made her sound. It was just hard to sympathise when Bea was 27 years old and finally enrolling in college classes for the first time and still felt completely out of place.
"I'm just saying, I don't know if this was the right idea. I'm not sure I belong here."
"Bullshit. You do. Stop panicking."
"I'm not panicking!"
Looking at a huge crowd of college students and how young they all were and calling your only friend on campus, who is a teacher, was not panicking. And definitely very cool. Just like Bea.
"You belong here," Jackie said, firmly. "So it might not be everything you dreamed about when you were twenty. That's okay. College is a lot more than what you dreamed about."
Bea took a deep breath. "I wouldn't mind being old if half these kids weren't smarter than you."
Jackie laughed. "They're not."
"But they went to high schools like..."
"They're not. You were smarter than half these kids when you finished high school, because you knew how to live. It's not like these folks don't have problems, but most of them don't have a clue what it's like to run a business or manage a family or just survive in a place like Possum Springs. You know shitloads, Bea. If you want to, you could eat them alive."
"I don't want to eat anyone. I just want to..."
What did she want? It was hard to remember. When her dad had died and she sold the Ol' Pickaxe, she didn't know what to do with the freedom. It was Mae who suggested she go to college, and Bea laughed it off. But when she told Jackie, trying to share the joke, she said "Yeah, Bea, you should." It had been a haze, though, that time of her life - the college application was just one more piece of paperwork between settling her dad's will and the deeds to the store, and she didn't really think she'd get in. By the time she was accepted, she was over the moon - but she also didn't really remember why.
"I want to go to college, I guess," she said, at last. "Or I did, when you first went. I just... wanted to be like you."
"You can't be like me. You have to be like you," Jackie said, simply. Then she raised an eyebrow. "Although you could have been a bit more like me and actually enrolled in my class."
"Oh. Well..."
It wasn't that Jackie's freshman class didn't sound interesting. Bea personally felt she couldn't relate very well to a subject like Gender and the Media-Constructed Self, but she couldn't say it wasn't interesting.
"You're the only person I know on campus," she said, apologetically. "I didn't want you to be my teacher as well. It would just be too weird."
"I guess that's fair enough," Jackie allowed. "But you need to get out there and make some more friends."
By the Thursday of her first week of classes... Bea still felt like an imposter. Despite the other students in her classes expressing surprise at her age, she still felt like she stuck out. People were friendly - much friendlier than she'd expected. It was actually a lot like when she used to come out to Bright Harbour for parties and pretend to be a college student, except that now it wasn't pretend. It's just that it still felt like it, when she had to turn down party invitations to go to her night shift at the Ham Panther, and took the bus to campus every day from the apartment she was renting instead of living in the dorms.
Classes were fun, though. She'd forgotten how much she used to like listening to college students talk about all the stuff they were learning about - and now she knew some stuff about them too and could sound smart, and classes were mostly like talking about that stuff all the time. She absolutely loved her intro to film studies class, and the gothic literature class was hard work with all the reading she had to do but so interesting. Today, though, today was social studies, and she was much less sure about social studies. The lecture she'd been to earlier in the week had been sensible enough, talking about economics and poverty and things that Bea understood well enough first hand. She'd loved getting the bigger picture. She just wasn't so sure about talking about it with a group of eighteen year olds who had never had to abandon their dreams to run their dad's store.
It was worse and better than she expected, in the end; this obnoxious wolf pup named Bailey was carrying on about how people should just move out of their small downs if they wanted to get jobs instead of staying there and asking for welfare. The upside was that Bea just tuned out and gazed out the window. It was a beautiful view from this building, gazing across the lawn to the old sandstone hall, and there was also some kind of dance-off going on down there.
She only tuned back in when she heard Bailey say "I guess it could be worth some economic stimulus in, say, Fort Jackal. It's not like it's Possum Springs."
"I'm from Possum Springs."
Bea said it without even thinking, without any plan for a follow-up. She just dropped it into the conversation and sat there as silence filled the room.
The teacher looked at her down his snout. "Did you want to expand on that, Miss..."
"Just call me Bea." She shrugged. "I don't know. I got here, but it took until I was 27. And my dad died. And I sold everything we owned. Like, you can say that it doesn't make sense to prop up these towns, but just ignoring us doesn't do anything either. And we still pay taxes."
Bailey nodded. "I'm just saying, people need to move to where the jobs are. We can't keep propping up the places where they aren't."
"Right. But do you get that moving costs money? When people have lost their jobs and don't have any hope of finding work that pays half as well because the business has left town, you can't afford to move, either."
She'd expected a fight, but everyone around the table was watching her, nodding, even Bailey. There was a cat on her right who hadn't said a word and was now gazing at Bea with something like admiration, and Bea was irresistably reminded of Mae. How maybe her dissociations weren't the only thing that had made Mae feel like she didn't belong at college. Bea was older, but apart from that, everything that set her apart from the average first year had set Mae apart, too.
Bailey cocked his head and said, "What would you do instead?"
It wasn't a challenge. He really wanted to know. When Bea looked at the faces around the table, they all wanted to know. She felt something like stage fright, like she was supposed to have something prepared and had forgotten her homework. But it wasn't like she'd never thought about this; she'd thought about it nearly every day for eight years.
So she cleared her throat and said, "Okay, well, I'm not an expert. That's why I took this class, so I could learn. But here's where I would start..."